candyman

Many people may not remember the "tablet revolution" of this period. Tons of consultants all raced to own and carry these things. They ran windows and worked fine but it just wasn't their time.

First of all if you are going to talk about valuation then that should be included here. And Google has always been terrible at developing and managing products. The list is too long to begin writing down. One funny example is the Pixel. I had a meeting with a slew of Google managers regarding mobile strategy (maps, reservations) and every single one of them had an iPhone. I doubt any of them ever even tried a Pixel. Same with the dozens (hundreds?) of software products that have died off or languished over the past 20 years.

Bentley was a bit of a blow hard which really stood out in CS circles. He was around CMU at times when I was there as a student.

It reminds me of how Ford started and owned the market, then GM became dominant by offering different colors, models, and styles that would appeal to the market segment that wanted a car but not the model T.

Other companies like BMW are doing very well with electric models because they are focused on delivering the same "BMW experience" in electric models.

As far as I can tell the 3 and the Y are decent vehicles but no longer illicit the kind of emotion that excites a purchase. I don't get the cybertruck at all in terms of product/market fit. Seems like an "Edsel moment" to me.

I think this hits the nail on the head, especially longer term. It's hard to compete with this level of low-cost production with steadily improving specs. Raspberry Pi seems caught in the middle with getting more powerful and expensive in a market that wants either very powerful/expensive or good enough/supercheap. Even a pretty full "desktop" mini computer R7/32MB etc is down to $300 and change. If RAPI files for an IPO I'll be keen to see what kind of margins they are generating.

Off the top of my head out about DraftKings $DKNG and Vertiv Holdings $VRT. Huge successes there.

True that the majority have been major disappointments but you can find some good ones.

Chamath Palihapitiya and Adam Neumann are up to their old tricks with a new spin! Happy AFD.

I am doing some work on this anonymous proxy space as it's related to AI data collection. There are three big players and apparently NetNut is one of them. Has anyone used this one or one of the others which I think are BrightData and "Oxy" but don't know that name?

As my eyes get older I need a brighter and higher resolution display. I use external monitors but like to be able to work while traveling or sitting in an easy chair sometimes. To make matters worse I like a lot of memory and a numpad. That makes it hard to find a good machine at a decent price. The high end Samsung seems to check all the boxes but it's expensive ($3K) and I've never owned one so wonder if I'd like the keyboard, etc. The Thinkpads are good but the mix of light/high resolution/numpad is not that easy to find.

This is cool and I enjoyed playing with it and the navigation settings.

But I am ignorant about what this would be used for.

Would love to learn more about the motivation and use cases.

Would Apple even notice something so small?

Check out Kraken Robotics. https://krakenrobotics.com/

The maintenance budget the central administrative system at IBM in 1985 was $4B or (about $9.6B in current dollars.) The idea of moving something like this to the cloud is hard to comprehend. Even if it could be done it would take years and cost maybe $100B. And what would be the ROI versus building new applications or businesses. These are business critical systems built to run in a specific environment, it is very hard to justify moving them to another platform.

This reminds me of a site that I miss that was called Regretsy and I often had tears in my eyes because it was so funny. Bravo!

I think Strava already offers this. I used it for a 10K last year.

Most of the cost in the internet is advertising. I was so happy to discover Kagi about a year ago. Saves me hours every week.

https://ipocandy.substack.com/p/finally-a-better-search

This is an interesting way to do this. I've been using Sublime lately and it's been okay but I need some organization. Does this allow something like "diary [name] [text] where you can add text to any diary with that name and if there is none it creates a new one? I will look at this in more detail next weekend when I am off from work.

The downfall of many LLM approaches seems to be the "black box" nature of the output. Regulators are demanding more transparency in how these systems generate content. Could this be a credible answer?

I agree that the nature of the algorithm allows it to generate false results which would not be acceptable in many domains. But I think there is tremendous potential to improve what you might call the "baseline" of what information and diagnosis is available. There are great doctors out there for sure but in many places there are close to zero doctors, or worse, bad doctors. While it's a very complex domain there are much simpler parts of it. A child with a cancer tumor in their brain is a very different case than someone who has a rash and a headache. There's a great deal of regulation as well that will come into play here so it's going to take a while. I know Google has a whole LLM that is using only healthcare data that they have been working on for a while.

Echos of Steve Ballmer who alienated many whiffed on cloud and mobile (!).

Google has killed their search with advertising and promotion to the point where results are useless.

Product management has been terrible for the things I use over a 10+ year period.

Based on recent employee accounts of the culture and mindset there it's a mess.

I don't know who this guy is, maybe he's just been a caretaker of a place that was already on this path but he doesn't seem to have done anything to improve it. And he's getting paid over $200M? No wonder working people get angry.

There’s something weird about hourly wages to me. I had a grading job in 1983 that paid $12/hour. Which definitely felt good then, especially because I could grade papers while watching football games on Sunday. I know the math would make that number much higher, ~$36 in “current dollars.” What’s weird is that it didn’t feel that way back then or now. It’s just how I process it in my head I guess. The tuition at the school then I think was $17K/year and now it’s over $80K.

So what if I draw a the Mona Lisa and sell it?

What if I draw some other painting but an obscure artist hanging in the same museum and sell that?

What if I attribute the work as in “My drawing of the Mona Lisa” or “My drawing of this picture I saw by <painter>”

What if my drawings look very different than the original? Does that matter?

I have been learning more about this industry and the need for efficiency since I had to do research for an article on Heidmar (https://www.spacvest.com/heidmar-shipping) since a part of what they do is help shippers understand and optimize their projected energy consumptions. I guess it will also spur an upgrade of the fleet to more efficient units. Installing units like these could be one of the value added services they might get into. I'd like to see more figures and backup on the website about the cost and potential savings. It's hard to get people to do something new unless the economics are very compelling.

I have configured a new MBP with the M2 chip a few times when I consider upgrading my laptop mix. I'm still pretty happy with an Air M1, Lenovo X1 Carbon (6th gen) and a big ThinkPad P17. But the cost comes in well over $3K on a config that I think is "worth it." I understand that you can amortize it over quite a long period and at some point I just might buy it. But at that price point it keeps ending up as a "not click" buy for me.

To give him credit I have to cite Dave Weiner who for me created the concept of of online information being a "river" which means you can watch it go by and not feel guilty about it. You pick out what you find interesting or important and let the rest go. I've never thought of "zero inbox" as something worth striving for. Just let it go...

It's good advice for multiple reasons. I put books down using this rule for many years. Sometimes I pick it up again and absolutely love it but I'm at a different point in my life and intellectual interests. It's kind of like mushrooms - when I was a kid I hated them, now I want them on everything.

I'd love to see something like this. I'm an old computer science guy and would love to write software again. I can write plenty of functionality in Python but I don't really want to learn all the JS stuff. I just don't like it. If I could abstract away the details it would be a big help. I'm not going to build anything that requires scale or commercial performance so I can afford to compromise versus the "purity" of having your own stack.

Lateral Thinking was published by Edward de Bono in 1967.

I wonder if we created the companies that we deserve? I worked at IBM a long time ago and they spent a ton of time and money developing employees. I was there when there was still a concept of “lifetime” employment. IBM was expensive but we smothered customers with support. Price was a factor but we still could compete on quality, support, service and I hesitate to say it, an actual relationship with our customer. We laugh at the joke now when someone says “if it was $2 cheaper I’d fly on a kite!” Ha, ha, LOL. Something about just caring about price and returns on investment has made it harder for companies to invest in their own people. Now that employees will jump for $$ the companies can also ask “why invest if the employee will just leave us in a second for more money?” There are still organizations out there that care but I think they are fewer and fewer. And none can probably be public. Like IBM in the 1980’s I think Twilio hired and spent like a drunken sailor because they could get away with it. IBM fired around 25K people at the beginning of the downsizing in 1988 or so and we didn’t even notice. Then another 25K or 50K and still, no difference. I think they topped out at 450K people. There were 100K people who basically didn’t do anything productive.

I don't think Google Corporate had any idea this was going on and that way more people were interested in it than normal and many were reporters and investors. It had a feel like a local Google dev group meeting which is informal. I stopped using Google Search months ago because it was totally unusable. For some things it's still good and I use search within Google Maps often.

I think this will make voice-based UI viable (finally!) which is great. It's going to definitely eat into traditional Google ad revenue since clicking around and "impressions" are going to go way down.